Brown Boy Mad

Nov. 2019 at Blackboard Plays in NYC

HISTORY

​SekouWrites was one of three writer-performers in No Good Nigg@ Bluez, a spoken word theater production that was featured in the 2003 New York International Fringe Festival. When that journey ended, Sekou wrote a derivative script for a one-man-show entitled DEAR WHITE MAN, but he never produced it and the project remained on his hard drive for almost 20 years.

In November of 2019, after seeing the return of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf at The Public Theater, Sekou unearthed the script for DEAR WHITE MAN, rewrote it, renamed it BROWN BOY MAD, and introduced it to @blackboardplays, a NYC-based nonprofit that connects playwrights with actors who can breathe life into their work. Encouraged by their feedback, Sekou rewrote the script (again) and brought it with him to Nashville in December of 2019 to tinker with over the Christmas holiday.

In January 2020, after Sekou gave a lecture at Fisk University about converting rage from microaggressions into creative work, Professor Persephone Felder-Fentress granted him permission to become an artist-in-residence at Fisk to develop his play with the help of the Fisk University Stagecrafters.

The end result was two staged readings of BROWN BOY MAD in Fisk University’s Little Theater, the second of which was the very last student activity on Fisk’s campus before the school was shut down because of the Coronavirus pandemic.